SC pans EVM critics

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday deprecated criticism of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and calls for reverting to ballot papers, saying the electoral process in India is a "humongous task" and attempts should not be made to "bring down the system". It also recalled how polling booths were captured in the era of ballot papers to manipulate election results. The top court was hearing a batch of pleas seeking complete cross-verification of the votes cast using EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), an independent vote verification system which enables an elector to see whether his vote was cast correctly. A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta was critical of the argument that many European countries have gone back to ballot papers after having tried out voting machines.

"This is a humongous task. No European country can do this. You talked about Germany but what is the population there. My home state West Bengal is far more populous than Germany. We have to repose faith and trust in the electoral process. Don't try to bring down the system like this," Justice Datta told advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for NGO 'Association for Democratic Reforms'.

Bhushan had pitched for a return to ballot papers while citing the German example. The bench said there were roughly 98 crore registered voters in India. "There will be some mismatch in vote count due to some human errors but it can be countered and checked," it said. Justice Khanna, while referring to booth capturing in the past, said, "Mr. Bhushan, we are all in our 60s. We have seen what used to happen earlier when there were no EVMs. We don't need to tell you."